Scott Christensen didn’t find painting — painting found him, the way most meaningful things do, through a side door, during a hard time. He grew up in Lander, Wyoming, where the land is enormous and unapologetic. Mountains press against the sky. Light moves across sagebrush in ways that stop you mid-step. That landscape shaped his eye long before he ever picked up a brush. He was an athlete first — shaped by his father’s coaching, the kind of early training that teaches you not just how to compete, but how to work, how to focus, how to keep going when things get hard. He carried that into a football scholarship at Chadron State College in Nebraska, until a serious neck injury ended his playing days without warning. Bereft, he turned to fly fishing and began visiting his grandfather, a wheelchair-bound amateur oil painter. Something about the smell of the oils got to him. He enrolled in art classes almost on a whim, and never really looked back.